Obama orders Cabinet to cut spending by $100M

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama on Monday ordered his Cabinet to find ways to slice spending by $100 million, but acknowledged it’s a “drop in the bucket” and said there’s a “confidence gap” that he needs to overcome. Just back from a Latin America summit, Obama told the first formal Cabinet meeting of his administration that vast spending to combat the economic crisis was “the right thing to do.” But he also said taxpayers still need to know that every dollar they give the government is being spent wisely.

“We also have a deficit - a confidence gap - when it comes to the American people,” he told reporters. “And we’ve got to earn their trust.”

Obama said the $100 million would come from “efficiencies” in agency operations, and would be in addition to future cuts in programs that aren’t working.

Yet the red ink in the annual budget is currently in the hundreds of billions. He was asked if the efficiency saving isn’t just “a drop in the bucket”.

“It is,” he replied. “None of these things alone are going to make a difference. But cumulatively, they make an extraordinary difference because they start setting a tone … $100 million there, $100 million here - pretty soon, even here in Washington, it adds up to real money.”

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Obama orders Cabinet to cut spending by $100M

I have 1 silly question I just have to ask. Is Obama THAT stupid or does he think that WE are?

$100M is a wad of money, to the average guy on the street, but in the grand scheme of the federal budget, bailouts and blatant pork expenditures, it’s not even a drop in the bucket. Pretty soon it all adds up to REAL money?? Even by Washington standards? Mr. Obama, you will have to cut that much and 9 times more to equal a BILLION dollars, and that is when we get to the drop in the bucket of exactly how much of OUR tax dollars YOUR administration is wasting!

I have said this before but here it is again, Obama really does think that We, the People are that stupid. We are not! He seems to believe that Americans are too shallow to comprehend the exact dollar figure, in size and scope, that 1 BILLION dollars represents, and he doesn’t think we know what it can do.

To give the average reader an idea of the kind of people Obama believes us ALL to be, I am going to share a story that I was involved in a few years ago.

The Texas Lottery was at $4million, an after tax cash payout of about $1 million. I was about to go to lunch with a gentleman I used to conduct business with and we were sitting in his office talking shop. One of his employees was going nuts, he had bought a lottery ticket and was saying how rich he would be if he won. He asked me if I had bought one and I told him no, I hadn’t, that a $1 million payout was just enough to change my tax bracket and I didn’t need that. At the time I was not exaggerating either, that was long before heart trouble and diabetes took me out of the game.

He was shocked, he looked at me and said, “You can retire on a million dollars man”, to which I replied, “No, not really, well, you can, but not comfortably…” The guy looks at me and says, “There is NO WAY you can spend a million dollars”. My buddy has been sitting there taking it all in and now he pipes up to the guy and says, “Apparently, you don’t know how to shop!!”

Obama seems to think that ALL Americans are like the guy that thought there was no way to spend a million bucks, and this $100M thing is supposed to make him look great to the unwashed masses!

Obama, wrong about Americans again!